Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…

What changes flow into the ongoing process of life during solo retreats to power-full places? I think a lot about all the others who I know, and do wish that there were folks who would be able to join me in these places. Some folks I would like to have join me and others, I know, wouldn’t appreciate it. Everything would be different, especially the bushwhacks and the rambles; the cooking and eating, sharing meals, and just hanging out together would recall so many prior times, and the deep and satisfying fun that was had by all.

The hikes: while most attention has to go to the movement itself, as there are considerable risks to walking solo in such places, mind may drift from immediate situation and the larger questions of what has become, what does become of life. It’s more of a noisy mess, but it is easier under these circumstances to do the yogic step away and allow the chitta vritti, the thought-noise, to simply happen, knowing that being in the moment is far more important and has deeper implications than any projections onto future (and very much theoretical) situations or into re-living historical situations. The pull of the un-fettered mind into both those spaces is strong, and the best tonic for that is the risk of solo bushwhacking where there is a steep penalty for not paying attention. I do catch myself every so often, verbally, aloud, slow-down slow-down slow-down, after I make a mis-step or blunder. The most common is when traversing some slick-rock face and stepping on a small pebble. That’s all it takes, send you 10 feet or 100 feet to the next ledge down, or to the canyon floor. Doesn’t make much difference how far, an injury would be immediate life-threatening even if it was a minor sprain — if immobilized, you would have to deal with at least one night out, maybe more, with hypothermia, then dehydration being the most problematic, then the problem of becoming predator food, the problem of attracting help could be very difficult, if in a slot canyon or off the normal known trails. I carry a loud whistle, and do leave small notes in my car which would direct search parties to general areas, but the terrain is vast, and there is much topography that would make searching difficult. I think they would wait a day at least before even checking the car anyway. Unless you told someone specifically that you would be in touch. There is no phone access, and so on, uff. Well, the point is, focus and caution have to be taken very seriously when soloing. I would do things rather differently if with one other or a small group. There is immediately a sizeable extra safety factor. Not that it would suddenly make risk disappear, but an innocuous stumble on the rocks wouldn’t immediately become a life-and-death situation.

What about these time-lapse movies? What are they about? I don’t know what to make of them, but have spent numerous hours making them — 2 minutes per hour is the rate that I’ve been using — a frame every 3 or 4 seconds to make a PAL 24 fps film. I guess I’ll make a dvd or maybe a single work, but have to think of the sound-track for them, that’s difficult.

Anyway, head out, south through Rangely, down the Book Cliffs, through Loma and meet Collin and Marisa at the airport office of their business, the Colorado Flight Center, get pizza and beer, and drive up the hill to Glade Park to have dinner with Bob, their next door neighbor.

Spending the night in the cab of the truck is no fun, but the snow is coming so hard and fast that there is no way of getting out and setting up the back to sleep without getting soaked and cold. So, park in Milford behind a stranded Hummer. Cold and uncomfortable, but good for toughening the constitution, eh? By the way, the image links now will initiate an image album for the entire month to come, higher-rez images (900×602 pixels) and a nice presentation interface. Comments welcome!

At Linda Leas café in Kanab, locals, non-Mormons pursue another religion, worship of java, across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. After the first night out. Wishing for a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to give a greater degree of risk possible. Snow or rain threatening in forecasts, and bentonite clay roads are impassable when wet. The guy working the BLM desk, old, over-weight, tobacco stains his white mustache brown, makes the warnings. He has to talk to foreign tourists and downstreamers a lot, surely. Folks who haven’t a clue about how it works out here. The Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument is so large, and the country so unforgiving, surely they have to scrape up the dessicated or flash-flood saturated remains of folks every year. On the other hand, this is no monkey-wrench territory anymore, it’s just a place for cheap virtual entertainment via wheeled vehicles with windows. Maybe some stars glimpsed, a whiff of juniper blossoms firing off tart pollen.

Typing like I can’t get over it. Wanting to find something to use, utilize, make happen, profit from, in this movement, this travel, across these space. Spaces that have so little to offer in transit, and less to offer when living, settled, in them. Nothing arrives. Nothing comes. Even with some caffeine enhancement via cappuccino. (Cappuccino here, wondering about the spread, propagation, of cappuccino across Amurika). In territories defined by the dominance of thin and watery drip-grind served by waitresses named Flo or Blanch, in stainless diners. Now, instead, cafés with multi-colored chalk menus on the walls, starting with espresso, then cappuccino, then lattes, and so on, with as many permutations as the local consumers demand to enhance their sensibilities. Retro interiors: Naugahyde, Formica, Vinyl, Linoleum, garage-sale vintage, cluttered.

Accident intrudes on the evening hunt for a place to camp. Again the bentonite clay playsa significant role. Up from Paragonah, into the National Forest a few miles along Red Creek Canyon, and the road starts to get wet, then snow-covered, no match for my vehicle, reach a zenith and decide to backtrack. With no turn-around exceptback a quarter-mile, I start backing, and a bit too fast, get caught in some old tracks in the mud and bingo! In the very muddy ditch up to the axle, with an overhanging branch almost completely ripping the bike rack off the roof. Shiite! Climb out the passenger side window, shaken, cursing, looking at the greying sky and approaching dusk, and knowing the forecast for bad weather.

This is the result of our trajectory, what we have done to this point, how we have proceeded: or is our trajectory a result of this? The cumulative affect we have as a form of life on this place. With the messy convolutions of relation that accumulate, stratigraphically, on be-ing. No flat-lying sediment with seasonal and measured pulse. Glacial, tectonic, up-heaving fossil be-ing exposed as scarified, reified tissue. How to excise, release, revive once fluid dreams from these frozen remains. Or is it impossible that once laid down from embodied flow, these traces contain only the form of life gone, drained of all strength, all presence, and any forward driving impulse.

Feigning indifference when chunks of life are covered over, awaiting the slow micro- crystallization of silica replacement. Rendering to glass all that came before. Glass to look at, to look through, and to see refracted life; to see the myriad pretty and terrible colors of it all.

Bodenlos and Heaven. and the ascent of be-ing as the ground turns to vapor and dissipates beneath the standing feet. how will these thoughts images intertwine? the German, rolling off tongue, with a dropping and slowing lilt. the English, heavy, gravitational in its religious orbit.

walking out of the building where people work at maintaining a certain form beyond hypostasis, Venus is low on the horizon in the irradiated semi-darkness. the semi- arising through the human re-concentration of energies. Licht. Light. Life. das Leben. I look upwards, taking care to stop walking. is this, what I see, is this heaven? it is called the collective signifier: the heavens. what is there to see but the anisotropy of matter revealing its presence? we are coalesced ejecta of novae. Ich fühle mich wie im siebten Himmel. or is it in us? the Empyrean, lifting us, vapors, to the brightness that fills the sky in the days, at the same time as burning in our chests.

and that, though known, is not brought into the path, the way. in ascendant modes, the heart intuits direction.

The foreigner (and foreign) is the one who acknowledges his own being-in-the-world that surrounds him. Thus, he gives sense to the world, and in a certain way he dominates the world. But he dominates it tragically: he does not integrate into the world. The cedar tree is foreign in my park. I am foreign in France. Humankind is foreign in the world. — Vilém Flusser

beginning of the year. putzing with WordPress for deployment of an aporee alternate channel in blog form. I don’t like WordPress because of the gap in my applied CSS knowledge that precludes easy modding of the GUI, but will work with it for awhile. the idea would be to get a coder to code a script to migrate everything to WordPress from the pmachine blog, and then get the whole site up into SQL format, all headings, and so on… slowly. while other things happen.

a fine afternoon hike in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area with a small group of folks that Howard assembled. fantastic weather, occasional views of the City shimmering south across the Bay, groves of (relatively) small second-growth Coastal Redwoods, some huge manzanitas (this is their optimal zone) and good conversation.

Here in the countryside village of Tilmanstone, Kent, in a Manor House once owned by a family who were Fascist organizers in the UK. I’m staying with David and Francis. Francis picked me up yesterday at Heathrow on my arrival from Iceland on an early morning flight. I was in Iceland for three days only, having flown there from New York on the 13th mainly to visit with Loki.

Everybody slept in until noon, something I haven’t done since I can remember! Usually up at 7:30 am. I was exhausted from jet-lag and a late night dinner with friends in Reykjavík and just the accumulated stress of travel. David had also just returned from New York City — on tour with a group of his students at the Winchester School of Art — we had already met at my friends Stefan and Ellen’s flat in Tribeca last week — but that’s another story…

Today we went to Deal, a village on the coast near Dover, for sandwiches at a caf.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

“Make ‘em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ‘em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ‘em once a week.”

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. — Douglas Adams

Then on to Canterbury for a stroll around the exterior grounds of the famous cathedral. We also visited with Lizzie and Jeffrey and their son Thomas not far from the cathedral. Jeffrey is a long-time member of the Brit-Rock group Caravan, is a member of Penguin Cafe, and is currently touring with the French pop legend Reneau. Thomas is nine and is into hypnotism and Pharaohs and he showed me a family album of photos of his grandfather who brought the first Model T Fords to Chile in the early parts of the 20th Century…